A Regular Guy by Mona Simpson Read Free Book Online Page A

and she jumped off his lap and sprinted inside. She was beautiful running. There were more nights, less than a dozen in all, and Noah remembered each in preserved detail. But she’d told him the first night she thought she might be gay. He’d seen her afterwards, riding on a bicycle seat holding the waist of a taller girl, who stood pedaling.
    Noah still thought about this girl often, but he didn’t mention her. It had ended so long ago, and anyway, not much had happened.
    Noah didn’t think it was impossible that he’d find love. In fact, he usually felt in love with someone. He needed to think of a woman in order to fall asleep at night. And to work as hard as he did. He told himself if he worked hard enough, work would win him love. He had a hunch that the woman who could love him would not be like Olivia. More the pretty-for-a-smart-girl type. She herself would look down, in a slight way, on women like Olivia. And, as if in deference to his future wife, Noah adopted this mild prejudice. Certain women did go for him, like the X-ray crystallographer upstairs. Rachel was motherly, and he could picture her large body in an apron even though she knew more about hydrogen bonds than anyone in the world. “I’ll marry you in five years,” she’d joked, “if you don’t find anyone else.” He was intimidated by her size.
    “So tell me what you’re doing in the lab.”
    Owens asked this same question at least once a month, too short a time for much to change. And these broad questions reminded Noahof his parents’ friends, who knew nothing about science, or of certain girls who assumed everything to do with laboratories was evil. “I told you about progenitor cells?”
    “Mmhmm.” Owens had the uncertain air of someone who didn’t really remember.
    But then, as Noah talked about cell fate, he remembered the article he’d read the night before in Nature , and his own excitement took over. In a bracing way, he was in a race with opponents who were also his friends—one lab in Seattle, another had just moved to New York, and he’d heard that Manloe in Copenhagen had begun using zebra fish. But he was late. As a postdoc, he’d discovered a great, promising mutation, fish that learned things and then forgot them, which got him grant money and the job here. Now, halfway to tenure review, he still hadn’t found the gene. And he’d let Louise, one of his postdocs, talk him into studying the mutation in drosophila, fruit flies, when she’d noticed something in the footnotes of a Caltech paper. The things were supposed to be in bottles all the time, in the one closet he’d allotted her, yet they were constantly in his hair.
    Owens walked with his hands in his pockets, head bent down. He seemed chastised, as if he were ashamed and a little sorry for his own life. He was also, of course, a multimillionaire. Even science couldn’t intimidate him for long.
    Noah was in the middle of saying that surfaces of all cells were extremely polymorphic and that the major histocompatibility complex proteins explained how the cell recognized the difference between self and other, a recognition that thrilled him.
    Owens interrupted. “What’s your ultimate objective?”
    That stopped Noah, for a moment. Owens, it occurred to him, thought like the people who wrote the essay questions for college applications. But then he blurted, “To see how it all works. To figure out how a heart cell knows to be that and not something in the foot.”
    “Aren’t you interested in sequencing the human genome?” Owens asked this question, too, every time they were together.
    Noah flipped his wrist. “I personally don’t want to. Even if you know the structure, you don’t know how it folds, what it does. It’s too slow for me. It took Rachel seven years to get the structure of herprotein. You met my friend Rachel. Rachel’s famous now. Her enzyme’s on the cover of a textbook.” Noah rubbed this in because Owens had once pestered him for